Tagged 'email marketing'

When your new customers subscribe to your newsletters or email updates, you unfortunately don’t have the chance to shake their hand and introduce yourself in person. Instead, you have to rely on your welcome email to draw them in, make them feel welcome, and let them know about your products and services.
Your welcome email is your first impression, and welcome emails have 320% more revenue per email than other promotional and bulk marketing emails. Combined with the 86% lift in unique open rate, this means that your welcome email is an opportunity for your company to greatly increase its revenue while also earning more customer loyalty. Here are a few ways to optimize your welcome emails to take advantage of this opportunity.
First, make sure that your subject line is well-crafted. Research shows that including the word “sale” can increase open rates by 23.2%, while using “save” only increases open rates by 3.4%. Other words to include in your subject line are “news,” “bulletin,” and “video,” but stay away from “report” and “webinar.”
Next, optimize the time you send the email and the address from which you send it. Send your welcome email in real time as opposed to a pre-determined bulk... Read more

Personalization is no longer a luxury; it’s an expectation. Marketers need to reach subscribers on their terms in order to engage and, more importantly, convert them. The effects of the shift towards personal marketing messages reach every aspect of your email campaigns, including your acquisition tactics.
It's no longer enough to think of list building as just email capture. Instead, email acquisition is actually a customer acquisition strategy. Old tactics, like purchasing an email address list, simply won't work. What will work is modal lightbox pop-up combined with a series of triggered, personalized welcome messages.
Modal Lightbox Acquisition

Regardless of how you feel about pop-up lightboxes, the simple fact is they work. We've seen retailers grow their email list by 30% or more in a matter of weeks using this tactic. And these aren't random email addresses – they're subscribers with the highest likelihood of becoming loyal customers.
If you're considering implementing this strategy, here are some tips to keep in mind:
• Test the timing and location of the overlay. Try triggering it three seconds after a shopper visits your site's homepage, 20-30 seconds on specific product pages, and even test an exit modal, which detects when the visitor is about to close the site... Read more

We’ve seen plenty of changes over the past 44 years, and one of the most significant changes is how email has become a staple in our everyday lives. In celebration of emails 44th anniversary this year, let’s use this infographic from email marketing provider Reachmail to take a look back at the evolution of email.
Electronic mail was officially invented in 1971, when Ray Tomlinson, a computer engineer, sent the first electronic mail message (a message he no longer remembers the contents of). Electronic mail made its way over to the other side of the pond, and in 1976, Queen Elizabeth II became the first head of state to send an electronic mail message. Two years later, over a network of government and university computers, the first electronically sent advertisement debuted.
In 1982, computer users decided that “electronic mail” was too much to type; thus, the abbreviated “email” was born. That same year, Scott Fahlman created the first ever smiley “emotion” as an alternative way to express feelings. In 1989, AOL’s signature phrases were recorded by radio man Elwood Edwards, and the sentences “Welcome,” “File’s done,” “Goodbye,” and “You’ve got mail!” became ingrained in the brains of e mailers everywhere.
In 1997, Microsoft... Read more

I recently had the opportunity to moderate a panel of leading fashion retailers at Fashion Digital New York that focused on the ever-challenging topic of customer acquisition and retention. Prior to our discussion, the morning’s keynote speaker had left attendees with the edict that it’s their collective job to create fantastic experiences online to increase purchase intent in retail. It was a perfect lead-in to our session, because it’s those experiences that set the table for customer acquisition and that position retailers’ brands for better retention over time.
But while that may sound simple, it’s easier said than done. At Listrak, we’ve compiled data from nearly a thousand retailers over several years that shows that a mere 15-20% of customers buy from a retailer’s website more than once. The vast amount of choices online has resulted in reduced customer retention and loyalty, making it a larger hurdle than ever for retailers to turn first-time buyers into two-time buyers, the crucial step that doubles the likelihood that they will purchase again.
In our discussion, our panelists shared the latest acquisition and retention strategies they’re implementing:
Storytelling

Retailers need to amplify the experiences of Brand Influencers to tell their stories online. For example, one retailer has... Read more

For any online sales company, email marketing is a crucial and extremely productive component of reaching more customers with more offers.
However, when it comes to email, even professional marketers who really know their email marketing strategy often completely miss some of the opportunities this promotional medium can offer.
Most crucially, we’re talking about the use of transactional emails as promotional vehicles for reinforcing your brand, increasing profits and engaging better with customers.
Transactional emails are all those one-off, transaction specific messages you send to particular users when they do something to trigger a particular kind of response.
Some excellent examples of transactional messages include (but are not limited to): shipping confirmation emails, comment notifications, order receipts and welcome emails for new subscribers.
You should be taking maximal advantage of all your transactional messages by optimizing them for maximal appeal to customers who might want to explore your products and service more through them. This means using every transactional message as a vehicle for additional promotion and product, service or interaction suggestions.
However, just be sure that you don’t so saturate your transactional messages with marketing hype that they lose their essential transaction related point. This will not only turn some customers off, it’s also potentially... Read more